STOP THE PRESSES! #4

Retro cartoon of an old time newspaper boy.
Here’s my latest hard-boiled homage to the tough-guy reporters of yesteryear – Walter Winchell and Jimmy Cannon.

Get this straight – George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest. Get over it . . . The ugliest thing on two legs is any dame with tattoos on those legs . . . Take this to the bank – Roosevelt and Churchill knew Pearl Harbor was coming and let it happen. Brave souls dared to say it was a set-up as the ships were still smouldering . . . One foreign spy even sent the US military his secret photos of the Japs’ table top model of their attack. Those pix were deliberately buried . . .

Day of Infamy by John Toland
Read it and weep.

FDR was such an invalid that his doctors let him work only four hours a day . . .  His own party wanted to dump him . . . The slimy Roosevelt clung on to power and spent most of his presidency convalescing on boat and train trips that were disguised as government business . . . Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina was the real president . . .  

James Byrnes with wife and dog.
The president you never heard of, uh… the one on the right.
FDR in leg braces
A rare photo of FDR’s leg braces.

The memoirs and diaries of reporters and diplomats reveal how shocked they were when they first met FDR and saw how sick and weak he was . . . The press protected FDR as it later protected JFK – another very sick man who was presented to America as an athlete full of vigor . . .

JFK in back brace
Ironically, the back-brace JFK wore kept his back straight but also kept him upright in the limo and open to the fatal head shot.

Had JFK survived his assassination in Dallas, his underlying health problems would have killed him during his second term . . . JFK was a notorious “Wham, bam, thank ya mam” Romeo. The amphetemine shots he got from a notorious “Dr. Feelgood” made him super horny and super fast . . .

Angie Dickinson.
Angie Dickinson fucked JFK and quipped, “It was the most exciting ninety seconds of my life.”

Speaking of speed – Fast One by Paul Cain is one of the all-time great hard-boiled crime novels . . . It was written in 1932 but makes tough-guy tomes written decades later read like sissy-stuff . . .

Poster of the film The Black Cat
Cain also wrote the screenplay for the underrated Karloff-Lugosi horror film The Black Cat
Boris Karloff in The Black Cat.
Karloff’s character in The Black Cat was based on the English Satanist Aleister Crowley.

Take this to the bank – Prohibition worked. It vastly reduced alcoholism and deaths from drunk driving . . . The movies and documentaries you’ve seen mocking Prohibition were made by people who had skin in the liquor racket . . . Algonquin Roundtable wits Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley shared a subscription to a funeral industry magazine . . .

Cartoon of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley
The morbid duo washed with the same soap that morticians use on corpses

As long as we’re on the subject of soap – the holocaust mongers no longer claim the Germans turned Jews into soap. They’ve dropped that hooey about Jews being made into lampshades, too . . . It was a braver man than I who ate the first oyster . . .

Vintage ad for skin lightener
Many African-American millionaires made their fortunes selling skin lightener and hair straightener.
Madame CJ Walker
Yeah but they don’t tell you how the bitch made her millions.

Blacks, Asians and Orientals still punish their bodies in a hopeless attempt to look White. Don’t believe me? Check out the ads in the back of their magazines . . . Your reporter thinks they should stop this mutilation . . . Attila the Hun was very short but Napoleon was of average height . . . Sigmund Freud was a complete and conscious fraud . . . Siggie was also a dreadful GP and a lethal surgeon . . . He dredged his toxic theories up out of his personal sexual sewer and simply stole and invented the rest . . . Freud, who was Jewish, wrote to friends that he needed neurotic middle-class Jewish women as patients since they were not really ill and would never get well . . .

Sigmund Freud by Frederick Crews
What Freud said that was true wasn’t new and what he said that was new wasn’t true.

These days no self-respecting shrink uses Freudianism which is now considered the phrenology of the 20th century . . .  

Phrenological head

Today’s savvy shrinks look at the family photos of their patients coz all the pain and problems are on full display . . . Sound wacky? Visit the Freud Museum in London and cast your eyes over the Freud family album. It’s bleedin’ obvious that Freud was a sadistic creep . . .

Young Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet.
The Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith was another conscious fraud. But he came to believe his own hokum and became the most fascinating figure in American religious history

Shortly before his assassination in 1844, Smith spoke as one who knew he was about to die. He gazed into eternity and preached profound and terrifying truths about the nature of God and man . . .

George Fox founder of the Quakers
George Fox who founded the Quakers in the 1600s taught that there were men on the moon.
Quaker Oats box
Joseph Smith who founded Mormonism in the 1830s agreed that there were men on the moon but they looked like Quakers!

Sorry to go against the grain but I’ve never joined the cheerleading for The Great Gatsby . . . Give me Fitzgerald’s essays about the Roaring ’20s. They are masterpieces . . . Even better is Appointment in Samarra written by Fitzgeralds’s close friend John O’Hara . . .

Cover of Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
The Great American novel? Maybe.

After Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat to Johnson in 1964 and when the Republican Party was at its lowest point in history, John O’Hara boldly predicted a Republican victory in 1968 . . . This newshound knows that when the mainstream media ridicules someone that someone is worth a second look . . . Take another gander at Silvio Berlusconi. He was the only leader to oppose the removal of Gaddafi and predicted that the fall of Libya would produce a flood of migrants from Africa into Europe . . .

Silvio Berlusconi
Now, ask yourself – who mocked Silvio and why?

I’ve never made it all the way through Some Like It Hot . . .  Say, don’t call me daffy – if Boris Johnson wanted to, he could stop the invasion of rapeugees into England via the Channel in a heartbeat . . . Wes Montgomery was a great jazz guitarist but I’ll take Kenny Burrell . . .

Kenny Burrell
Great guitarist. Great musician. Great teacher. The bum can sing, too!

If it weren’t for White fans both jazz and blues would have died decades ago . . . On the last day of his presidency Bill Clinton (acting against the advice of his aides) pardoned the Jewish criminal Mark Rich and the Jewish terrorist Susan Rosenberg . . .

Susan Rosenberg terrorist and BLM leader.
Call me old fashioned but I’ll take Angie Dickinson over this Hebraic hag any day.

Meanwhile – the more things change the more they remain the same . . .

The Jews behind the NAACP

Legend has it that L. Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology on a bet with other sci-fi writers . . . Sssshhh, it’s an open secret that one of the top sci-fi writers lived for years on his own tropical island where he indulged his taste for young boys . . . The African country of Liberia was founded in 1822 under President James Monroe . . .

Monrovia, Liberia
That’s why Liberia’s lovely capital is named Monrovia.

Liberia was to be a haven and fresh start for freed American slaves . . . The first thing those freed slaves did when they got back home to Africa was get slaves . . . Meanwhile, on the other side of Africa . . .

Somali man with bloody head.
Somalis have the lowest IQs on earth aside from Australian aborigines.

Try this on for size – Minnesota has more Somalis than anywhere on earth aside from Somalia.

Burning store in Minneapolis during BLM riots.
What could possibly go wrong?
Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio
Available as an eBook here and as a paperback and ebook from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

Shed a tear for poor Bela Lugosi.

As Brooklyn boy Lenny Bruce quipped, “Bela was a junkie for ten years, cleaned up and dropped dead.” And, it’s sadly true that Lugosi had become addicted to morphine while undergoing medical treatment. It took him many painful years to kick the habit. 

His was a classic case of a film career that started at the top and finished in the sub-basement. Think about it. From Tod Browning’s Dracula to Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Ouch! 

Bela Lugosi's stand in - Plan 9 From Outer Space
Not the long dead Bela but Ed Wood’s wife’s chiropractor!

And, insult to injury, after a horror movie career spent sucking hind tit to his competitor Boris Karloff, Bela took over from Boris in the Broadway comedy Arsenic and Old Lace.  Getting sloppy seconds was bad enough but Bela had to play a character whose facial scarification was based on Karloff as Frankenstein. The biggest laughs in the play were built on that gag. (I wonder if they did a re-write so that the crazed brother Jonathan was said to resemble Lugosi as Dracula. If not… double ouch.) 

Boris Karloff in Arsenic and Old Lace
Boris and Bela did not belong to a mutual admiration society.

When not appearing in a succession of bargain-basement horror films, poor Bela schlepped around the world in Dracula drag appearing in fleapit revivals of the stuffy old play. An actor friend of mine worked with Lugosi in one such production and reported that the company rehearsed the play without Bela who was only contracted to appear for the final dress rehearsal. And, at that, he would do only a quick walk through of his scenes. Count Dracula actually appears in surprisingly few scenes in the stage version.  And, Bela sure didn’t need the rehearsal, he’d been doing the same tired moves for decades.

The cast was assembled on stage awaiting Lugosi when the theater’s hydraulic lift suddenly cranked into action and slowly raised the floor of the orchestra pit. There stood Bela in full Dracula splendor. The cast formed a receiving line and Bela walked down it shaking and kissing hands while clicking his heels and repeating “I am Lugosi.” He thoroughly charmed the pants off one and all. But, during the performance, my friend was surprised to see buckets of ice in the wings. And, saddened to see Bela thrust his pin-cushion junkie’s arms into the ice to reduce his pain. 

Bela Lugosi in Son of Frankenstein
Bela effortlessly stealing Son of Frankenstein

Some critics dismiss Lugosi as a one trick pony but I think that’s unfair. He created an iconic film character that is instantly recognized around the globe and not many actors can say that. He was deliciously evil as the hunchback Ygor in Son of Frankenstein. And, he was terrific in The Black Cat and in the criminally underrated Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. If only he had lived, Bela could have feasted on the movie memorabilia boom of the late 50s and 60s. And, I gotta believe that Roger Corman would have cast Bela in his Edgar Allen Poe movies. He would have been perfect casting and big box office partnered with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr.

Bela Lugosi and Lou Costello in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
Bela having a ball with Lou Costello

But, hey, they can’t all be gems…

Movie poster for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
Hey! Don’t blame Brooklyn!

In 1952, our hero was forced/enticed into making the “Poverty Row” comedy-horror flick Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Now, I am second to no one in my affection for all things Brooklyn and for movies that feature guys in a gorilla suit but even I have my limits. (It’s on YouTube if you dare.) 

Sammy Petrillo and gorilla in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
Doesn’t look like any of the Brooklyn gorillas I knew.

Bela actually managed to walk through this turkey with style and wit. But, this former Shakespearean actor who had worked with Garbo must have been thinking, “How the fuck did I end up playing second banana to a team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis imitators and a schmuck in a gorilla suit?”

Bela Lugosi and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka
Bela having a ball with Garbo in Ninotchka.
What might have been?
Bela Lugosi and gorilla in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
How the fuck… ?”

I repeat.

Shed a tear for poor Bela Lugosi. 

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Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio 
Image: the smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn
Available as an eBook and paperback
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn